Wisconsin Employees’ Union and the Wisconsin State Budget Deficit
For now, the issue between the Wisconsin State Employee Unions and the Wisconsin State Government has been settled – state employee’s collective bargaining privileges are diminshed (excluding fire and police employees), they will contribute more to their own healthcare and retirement AND….the state will no longer garnish employee wages for union dues on behalf of the Unions. The last point, automatic deductions, means the unions will be responsible for collecting their own dues from employees who join the union.
Terms:
Are unions about employee rights being protected?
Regardless of how you received your information on this issue, did you hear of any right to be protected other than the right to collectively bargain? Is that even a right or simply a decades old negotiated labor arrangement between unions/employees and employers? Do arrangements/agreements evolve into irrevocable rights over time never to be renegotiated or rearranged? With respect to employee rights, I did not read or hear of any employee rights specifically in need of protecting. Were the working conditions intolerable with rampant discrimination and harassment? Were wages being garnished illegally (besides union dues being garnished), unlawful hiring, firing, rehiring? Ask yourself, “what employee rights did I hear or read about in need of protecting beside collective bargaining?”
If you are not pro union are you against protecting employee rights?
Department of Labor, EEOC, OSHA, Civil Rights Division of DOJ, EPA: combined, these Government agencies have budgets in excess of $14billion/yr and have thousands of employees/officers protecting employee rights. If you are an employer, having dealt with any of these agencies, you know this – these agencies are 100% employee advocates and they are serious about what they do. This does not take into account all the state and local laws and state agencies that offer redundant protection in the name of employee rights. The icing on the cake? Lawyers who will sue any business, any employer any time for anything. If you are not pro union, that does not make you against protecting employee rights. If unions went away tomorrow the Department of Labor, EEOC, OSHA, Civil Rights Division of DOJ, EPA would still be here with the billion dollar budgets, thousands of employees, and the ability to fine and incarcerate the guilty. You can be opposed to the redundancy of unions and still believe in the protection of employee rights.
- Why are union leadership and the politicians so adamant about collective bargaining and the garnishment of union dues?
The Wisconsin battle presents the perfect “cataclysmic” storm for unions and the politicians they support. First, state union employees will have to contribute to their own health insurance premiums and retirement ( still pennies on the dollar compared to the rate private sector employees contribute). Let’s remember, regardless of how much state employees contribute toward their own benefits, all of what a state employee earns comes from taxes, and it is the tax payer on the hook for 100% of what state employees receive, whether in wages, benefits, or benefit contributions.
Going forward, Wisconsin state employees will pay more toward their health and retirement benefits. At the same time the the State of Wisconsin will no longer automatically deduct union dues from state employees who must now submit their own dues. In fact, you can make a case that the Wisconsin state employee has gained rights as they have a choice and could opt out of paying union dues after the current contract expires.
Now you have Wisconsin employees paying more for their benefits (approx. $2,000 more a year) with a choice of voluntarily paying into a union. As wages are not garnished by collecting union dues, where do you think many State employees will choose to save money? Union dues most likely. Now you know why the union leadership and Progressive politicians are up in arms – they just lost their guaranteed revenue stream. How many of the 300,000 state employees can opt out of $400 to $1,000/yr dues before it impacts the union coffers? If every state employee paid $400/yr in union dues that’s $120 million in union dues. That would be $120 million in tax payer dollars in union bank accounts.
What does the union do with $120 million dollars (and that is a rough estimate on an average of $400/yr dues and 300,000 state employees)? We have already established that unions do not need to protect traditional employee rights. The Federal Government spends billions to do that and unions do not spend any money on something they can get from the Federal Government. So where does the money go? Surely some of it goes to maintaining the union itself; offices, salaries, management, office supplies and such. Where else do those dues go? In the last two years, the ten biggest unions in the country gave approximately $20 million to Democratic politicians compared to a few thousand to Republicans. What motivated the Wisconsin Democratic Senators to abandon their duty, their state and their constituents? It wasn’t for the benefit of the state employees, but rather in their own political self-interest that they left the State, preventing the necessary quorum to vote on the Wisconsin budget which included eliminating the garnishment of union dues from state employee wages.
This is the crux of the issue – the guaranteed revenue stream from state employee to unions to politicians. Oh, and the granting of collective bargaining “rights” is how the politicians who received the union contributions paid back the unions and their employees — a Ponzi/pyramid scheme with the tax payer at the bottom.
The average union member’s interest most likely does not include much beyond maintaining pay scales, benefits, and probably good working conditions. If we are honest, these are issues important to all of us as employees and employers whether we are a union or non-union member. The other issues — those are issues that seem to drive union leadership and politicians. If the regular union members do not come together to purge out the extreme factors within their leadership ranks, unions will either become extinct or bankrupt the states and country.
What do Unions Leaders want protected from?
What do unions protect their members from? The best I can tell, they protect their members from Free Enterprise principles and relationships. Unions are no longer fighting for employee rights, but for employee privileges – sheltering them from the same principles and standards that exist in the private sector employee/employer relationships. Employment is based on time not performance. Retirement with a pension often in excess of income earned while working, little to no personal contribution, and at a much earlier age than in the private sector, with minimal contribution to other generous benefits. The typical union employee has an income and benefit package more than 30% higher than the same job in the private sector.
The Government employee has the best of everything. Better wages, better benefits, employee rights protected by State and Federal Governments, and a quid pro quo political/union relationship granting them privileges that cannot possibly exist in an economic model where compensation is based on performance. In the Union business model, compensation is endorsement based not performance based.
Would the average state union member accept the same working terms and conditions available in the private sector? How would we know? As long as the mouthpiece for the unions reflects the union leadership and not union membership how will there be a return to normalcy in the union/employer relationship?
Three very informative articles
Why should you care about what is happening in Wisconsin?
You should care about what is going on in Wisconsin because you most likely live in a state that either has this issue or will in the very near future. Understanding the issues in Wisconsin will better prepare you to define and defend your position later.
Not being pro union does not mean anti-employee rights – DOL, EEOC, DOJ, OSHA will still be in place if unions are not. Protecting the unions does not protect employee rights any more than what they are already protected by State and Federal agencies, it is protecting the revenue stream from taxpayer to union leadership to elected official that seems to be the more immediate goal. It is the same type pyramid scheme that sent Bernie Madoff to prison. Protecting the current union based business model is to support endorsement based employee compensation instead of performance based compensation. We see how well that worked for GM, Chrysler, and much of the US manufacturing industry.
The unions served a purpose once upon a time. If the current system is not reformed, unions will have outlived their usefulness. Just the way it is sometimes — societies must evolve and transition. What the unions demanded decades ago in terms of wages, safety, and other rights the States and Federal Governments now spend billions to protect. To be clear, the issue is much less about the union member and more about the union system, and the quid pro quo relationship between union leaders and politicians. Let us distinguish: the American worker is still one of America’s greatest assets while union leadership and lobbying have become a detriment.
It is time for the current system to evolve and we must acknowledge the current union system has outlived its usefulness. It is just time. The present union system is broken and corrupt, evolving into something it was never meant to be. The time has come for unions to evolve with the current economic times or they will continue to be purged from the market place.
You do not need to be an Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, or even Paul Krugman to understand this issue. You do not even need an in-depth knowledge of economics as the issue is now reduced to simple math. Any individual, business, state or country that continues to spend more than it takes in will eventually go bankrupt – period. This should concern unions as once an entity declares bankruptcy all contractual terms can be renegotiated and perhaps voided by the courts – even collective bargaining terms. It is ironic – the more demanding the unions, the faster states move towards insolvency, the closer unions may be moving to their own demise.
It is up to the citizens of each state to decide will they allow unions to do to their state governments what they did to the steel industry and auto manufacturing? It is no accident that Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Mississippi do not have the issues of California, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Unions do not have to be dissolved, but it is time they learn – evolve or perish.
RD Martin
